Update: This story has been updated to include comments from the Michigan Catholic Conference.

LANSING -- Sending children to Catholic school instead of public schools appears to have no benefits for student performance by eighth grade, according to a new study from a Michigan State University economist.

"Across many outcomes, both academic and behavioral, we don't find anything that seems to point to a real benefit of Catholic schools over public schools," Todd Elder, MSU associate professor of economics, said about his research published in the Journal of Urban Economics.

Elder's findings are based on test scores for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, and show that the more than two million students in Catholic schools across the nation do not perform better than their public school counterparts.

The results show that Catholic school students did not show a measurable increase in reading scores compared to public school students in the test group, and math scores dropped for Catholic students while scores for public students increased.

The study analyzed data on about 7,000 students who participated in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, according to an MSU news release. The students were tested in kindergarten and first, third, fifth and eighth grades to gauge their performance.

Elder said the findings could be attributed to kindergarten students entering Catholic school being more prepared than their public counterparts, and lower salaries for Catholic school teachers could be to blame for the lower performance.

"Some people say Catholic schools are doing more with less," Elder said in the release. "But these findings suggest they're not doing more with less -- that they may, in fact, be doing less with less."

The study also examined behavior issues and attendance rates and found "no significant benefit" to enrolling students in Catholic schools, Elder said.

The Michigan Catholic Conference challenged Elder's rationale, citing data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

"The data shows that by eighth grade, Catholic school
students are scoring higher than their public school counterparts in both
reading and math," Dave Maluchnik, the conference's spokesman, said. "So, if we accept the author's notion that public school
students are growing, the government data shows that
they're still testing at least a grade behind Catholic schools in both math and
reading performance by eighth grade."